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Elend rides at the head of his army on a white destrier scrubbed clean of ash, General Demoux on a roan beside him. The horses are for display — once the inoculation is done the officers will travel the rest of the way to Fadrex in canal boats — but today the army is drawn up in full ranks, polished armour over uniforms kept as clean as the ash-covered wilderness allows. The men are afraid. They know what is coming. They have heard the rumour and yesterday Elend confirmed it: today his soldiers will be exposed to the mists, and roughly one in fifty will fall to the sickness before sundown.

He has learned about himself, Elend thinks as he rides their lines, that he is too honest a man to hide his own doubts. He gives Vin all of them and tries to spare the soldiers any. He had offered any man who wished it the chance to march back to Luthadel instead of facing the mists in the field — he can still use them in the capital, and would rather not march with men unwilling to face this — and almost none had taken the offer. Most lined up in full kit without being told. He flares pewter to send his voice out over them, Riots their courage, and shouts what they need to hear: that the mists will strike some of them down but most will recover and never need fear them again; that to arrive at Fadrex uninoculated would be to invite a morning ambush they could not fight, with a sixth of their force shaking on the ground. He invokes the Survivor, Lord of the Mists. Some of the men straighten.

Demoux reins in beside him and quietly asks if Elend meant what he said about the Survivor. Yes, Elend tells him; he gave his word. The general presses: well, then the Survivor would not want a man speaking in his name who does not believe. Elend frowns, then makes himself answer. He does not know what he believes any more. Demoux tells him, gently, that that is not much of a profession of faith — and Elend tells him that his trouble with faith is honestly come by: his last god was killed by the woman he eventually married, a woman Demoux's church calls its Heir of the Survivor and who spurns the devotion. He does not reject the Church — he would rather believe something is out there helping them than not.

Demoux accepts that, and then offers something else, something the new church has clearly been working out: that the Lady Heir does not understand because she still thinks of Kelsier as a man. Many of those who knew him do. Demoux explains it the way he has come to see it. Kelsier the man died in the Pits of Hathsin; what came back was a man invested with something eternal. The proof — to Demoux — is the simple fact that a thief who had spent his life dodging obligators and noblemen, who could not have avoided beatings or near-deaths, somehow did not Snap into Mistborn powers until the Pits. Something met him there. Elend turns away. The scholarly half of him sees a church doing the necessary work of making its founder into a god. The other half hears that the rationalisation is at least a useful one — and a hard fact to argue away.

Someone screams. Elend looks up. The mists are growing into the air in their odd impossible way — sprouting like plants — and the late sun is reddening into the horizon. The captains call for the lines to hold. Pockets open in the ranks as men drop randomly, like cut marionettes, and the soldiers around each one back away in horror. Elend grabs the reins, Pulls courage into the men around him, calls to Demoux to ride with him into the ranks. Demoux does not follow. Elend turns. Demoux is shaking horribly in his saddle; even as Elend watches, he slips from his roan into the ankle-deep ash. He had assumed without thinking that Demoux, like Vin and the rest of the old crew, was already immune. He throws himself down beside the convulsing general while soldiers all around them scream and captains shout for order, and the ash keeps falling.